The wind picked up today, stripping the trees of leaves. We still haven’t had hard frosts. I clear my windows with windshield fluid, the lazy fucker I am. Scraping is coming soon.

There is two cabbages, an entire row of rutabagas, three kale plants and a few weed plants drying on the vine. It seems like every fall is getting later.

The sunflowers are down. No sense keeping them up. The starlings got the seeds the beginning of September, those rabid raptors. The chickadees are shit out of luck.

Watched a three point buck run by, skittish, with a string of Christmas lights tangled in its antlers. My young companion said, if we could tell it we are trying to help we could untangle the antlers. I told him I don’t speak deer and the deer don’t speak our language.

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That wind is going to turn on us soon. I used to be comfortable with a tarp, now I’m thinking a dugout, cave, lined with moss, where the roots of the trees, can be depended on, storing the heat, I could cozy up to it like a heating grate in the city. Just like the city, if you followed that advice, you’d be frozen stiff.

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The best wager is to watch those wagging trees in the southern wind, consider yourself lucky, remember the year before, and hope the leaves end up in your neighbours yard.